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# This out-of-work Hollywood worker sees elves
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/this-out-of-work-hollywood-worker-sees-elves/
- Published: 2004-01-26T16:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-24T23:08:26.000Z
- Author: Guest Author
- Tags: Opinion, Downtown, #archive-import

*By Caroline Bodkin*

Last weekend I was at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City and Salt Lake City, Utah, my hometown and I saw a documentary film called “Investigation into the Invisible World,” directed by Jean Michel Roux. This film is about mysterious Iceland, and the large percentage of Icelanders who believe in and claim to have seen what they call “hidden people.” This includes ghosts, elves, fairies, sea-monsters and extra-terrestrials. The documentary suggests that because of Iceland’s location at the seam of the American and European tectonic plates, because of its sustaining and respectful relationship with nature, and/or its openness to Pagan traditions, it has developed into a nation that’s more aware of and more open to an “unseen” realm of reality. It is able to tune into “frequencies” that most can’t.

On Jan. 30 I’ll be out of a job again. This will be my third period of unemployment after graduating not even three years ago, and though it should terrify me, after having seen that film, I’m actually looking forward to a blank slate. Being out of a job is not cool … unless it means you’ll find a better one.

The documentary features a series of interviews with a variety of people — from the former President Finnbogadottir, to children, to working mediums — all of whom speak of this “hidden” world as though it is a given. It’s like those 3-D posters that were popular in the mid ’90s — at first glance it just seems like a messy square of color, but when you change the way you focus on it, you can see the 3-D image of a dolphin, a skyline, a beach, whatever. These Icelanders are all people who can see the 3-D image, while the rest of us are saying “Why do you have that lame color print of nothing on your wall?”

Anyway, I sat there in the downtown theater, close to midnight, watching this documentary, and I was totally struck. By the time I walked out of the place, I was a believer, thinking, “I’m an ignorant moron because I can’t see the elves in the rocks! Why can’t I see the elves living in the rocks? Are there ghosts in my house?

I bet there are ghosts in my house, and I’m just so focused on my own lame frequency that I don’t realize it. My life’s too chaotic. I need to be more open. Why can’t I have an outer body experience so I can communicate with the supernatural, or travel to other universes? I want to communicate with elves. I want an elf friend.”

But I work in Hollywood. And if there’s one place where you’re not going to be receptive to the spirits of nature, the kindly elves, the souls of the collective consciousness, it’s here.

So that’s what got me thinking. I started my job hunt about a week before going to Sundance. Dutifully, I began submitting resumes, trying to get general meetings, deciding if I want to continue to work in Hollywood or become … something else. But now, after the movie, I’m changed.

I’m wondering about the spiritual medium in the documentary. How did she become a spiritual medium? Please understand! I mean she was standing in a field of grass and boulders, natural as could be, pointing to one of the rocks, explaining, “There’s an elf university here. They’re watching a presentation, but their technology is more advanced than ours, so they don’t need a projector. An elf girl is telling me all this right now. But she’s not speaking it; she’s clairvoyant and doesn’t want to disturb her classmates, so she’s speaking to me silently.” An elf university. In the rocks in the field.

This is cool. Honestly — I’m not making fun. I’m saying that I’ve been sending in my resume to job positions where I’d get to perform a new set of annoying and brainless tasks, to answer another someone else’s phone, to continue on in this industry, and it finally occurred to me that I’d rather be a medium. Or anything else. I’d rather talk to elves, see ghosts, be the first to know when the next spaceship is going to land.

So I guess I’ll work on my resume some. Don’t know whether that kind of position cares about my college GPA, or my time studying abroad, or the fact that I worked for a big action director, but we’ll see. We’ll see. We will see. (Caroline Bodkin lives in Los Angeles and wonders daily if she’ll miss her calling. You can )

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on January 26, 2004.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/012604.pdf?ref=smdp.com)